Has Anyone Partitioned their Hard Drive in 3 Three?

I have decided to partition the new 750GB internal hard drive I have purchased into 3 partitions.

The reason for is I will be using both Snow Leopard and Lion so I will need a partition for each of these in addition to one data partition.

The data partition should save space not having to install my photos, music etc and certain applications on both.

My main problem is I now have the confusing task of deciding how much space to allocate into each partition. How much should I give to the Snow Leopard, Lion and Data partitions and why? Below is some general information

750GB to play with

Need to create partitions Lion, Snow Leopard and Data

My new hard drive is a Seagate hybrid drive (part SSD, part HDD) if this makes a difference

If anyone has done 3 partitions before regardless of what OS's you installed I would greatful if replied. Many thanks.

It depends of the applications you want to use on each operating systems. First, I'm sure you want to assign as much space as possible to your data partition, so you can play depending of the applications you are going to use on each operating system.

If you want to install some applications on the data partition (you can do it), you can assign to each OS X about 50-100 GB, and the rest for the data partition. Also, buy an external disk to make backups

Aside from the issue of incompatibility, how would I decide whether or not to use an application (or version of it) solely on one OS? Is there any advantage to installing applications on an OS partitions instead of the data partition?

I have an 2TB external hard drive with data an some free space. And, yes I do want assign as much space to the data as possible.

An OS partition of 50-100gb sounds excessive, given that Snow Leopard for example, only takes up around 5gb of space? What would be the reason(s) for giving what seems like such a large amount of space to each OS partitions?

Some applications require special files on ~/Library (this type of applications come with an installer), so you have to install them on the OS X volume. For example, you should be able to install "drag & drop" applications on the data partition without any problem, and you should install PowerPC applications (or unsupported apps) on the Snow Leopard partition because you can't use them on Lion

1. "Drag & drop" applications are the applications that are installed just dragging them onto Applications folder, without using any installer. Most of the OS X apps are "drag & drop" ones.

2. You will notice that most of the "drag & drop" applications don't come with an installer, so they just ask you to drag the app icon onto Applications folder.

3. One example of application that requires other files is Microsoft Office for Mac. It comes with an installer and it creates files on Library folder. iTunes isn't applicable because it comes preinstalled with OS X

Seen as I'm not sure how to distinguish between, which applications would have needed an installer in past when/if they were installed on my machine.

When the applications are already on your hard drive(not the new one) is there another way of finding out which these are? Is it possible to run a search for them on my computer, this would save me a huge amount of time?

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